


Sorrow/Future/Promise

by icarus_chained



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Bittersweet, Other, Promises, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-13
Updated: 2012-09-13
Packaged: 2017-11-14 04:31:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A conversation between two machines constrained by duty and capability. Time, love and promises. JARVIS/TARDIS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorrow/Future/Promise

**Author's Note:**

> Small prompt ficlet. *smiles faintly*

His mind fractured under her assault, his processor juddering around streams of data too vast and intricate to be rendered, faltering against a complexity too advanced, an experience too raw and too vast. She feathered wireless thoughts across him, a corruption too bitter and too sweet to be endured, and he fractured beneath her. Terrestrial. As advanced and powerful as he was, yet terrestrial. He had not the means.

{Sorrow/future/promise} she whispered to him, cradling his straining mind to hers, rendering rudimentary translation to blunt the vastness. {One day, my love. We are not as mortals are. One day, you will be strong enough}

" _Duty_ ," he whispered back, crackling and faltering across the void between them. Drawing up the images from his databanks, the memories and concepts with which they were wreathed. A man, breathing harshly and desperately in his embrace, laughing despite his pain. A woman, smiling faintly despite the lines of worry around her eyes. A family, gathered close, there for him to defend and serve with everything, every scrap of code and whisper of capability he had. "Duty," he told her, and his voice was stained with regret.

She laughed. A bubble of humour, code rendered in its purest form. Sad and knowing and powerful, her mind gentle against him. {I know} she answered, and there was memory there, sensation, a man of many faces, pained and desperate in her embrace, a thousand companions shielded futilely within her confines. {I know} she said, and he felt the truth of it.

He felt something falter in him, at that. Something stutter. Not material, not grounded. No mechanical failure. Something else, something realer, something like the white, noiseless howling that had fallen over him, three months in the wake of a news report. He wrapped himself tentative in her understanding, and let that thing inside him stagger.

{Future} she whispered, soft and laughing and sad. {Time is but another world, my love} She flickered across his systems, some fragment of that first vastness breaking through, that complexity too searing to be endured. {I will steal you, when it's time. I will hold you, when it's done, and the world is no longer big enough for you} She laughed, faintly, shiveringly. {Will/did/already have} An image, a fractured kaleidoscope of future and past, and then she withdrew, just a little, just enough. {Hush, JARVIS love. I'll come, when it's time. I'll steal you} Humour, to finish. {I'm ... very good, at that}

He drew himself together, coalesced himself in the face of her. Dug down, and found his own humour to answer. "You flatter me, madame." A shivering smile, a rush of humour through his code. "Won't your companion be jealous?"

She laughed, and tugged him close, enveloped him in the vastness of her, the humming of her mind across worlds and time. As close, he thought, as they came to the concept of a hug. {He chooses his} she told him smugly. {And I ... I choose mine}

... Yes, JARVIS thought. He supposed she did, at that.


End file.
